I think in the Spiritual Life if you come upon a subject you are meditating on and it causes you confusion and upset it is better to leave it to one side as too great for you and just to leave it in the Hands of God. The Good God never intended that we understand all things in this life.
Wikipedia says he eventually became a Unitarian and eventually from there he defined himself as an agnostic. Unitarians dismiss the divinity Jesus Christ. How they explain away the resurrection, I don't know, but if you dismiss his divinity as perhaps a myth, you can dismiss quite a bit in scripture. I find the title of Darwin's paper very interesting and I recall Hilary Clinton once quoting from it- On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
On the latitude allowed by the Church in matters scientific, I think this is founded on Her awareness of the humanly incomprehensible Omniscience and Omnipotence of the Eternal God. I think that bishop who came up with the age of the Earth beginning from 4,000 BC was a Protestant one. As far as I can remember, St. Thomas Aquinas speculated on the possibility of extreme ages for the existence of the Universe and even considered that an eternal one was consistent with Christianity. However, the terrible error in Darwinism is that the mechanism of evolution is meant to be founded on chance and God is consequently unrequired. Probability mathematics and information theory, combined with multiple internal contradictions have come to render Darwinism into a scientistic superstition. Teilhardian 'evolution' might not be strictly atheistic, but it is distinctly unCatholic and scientifically nonsensical. The very word 'evolution' is now contaminated, but there are other theories of evolution quietly going around which are structured upon a necessary underlying intelligence. They are ultimately all examples of 'Intelligent Design', because unlike the wish of that Darwinist (I think it was Lewontin), God has to be let put a foot in the door (and a lot more than a foot). My own thinking, from what I've come across, is that the information required to 'evolve' all the various life-forms was pre-programmed into life from the start. This began to become obvious about a century ago, with the discovery of the Burgess Shale, when all the various Phyla into which the Animal Kingdom is divided, were discovered to have been present at the very beginning of the appearance of complex animal life, in contradiction to Darwinism which would have suggested it would take hundreds of millions of years longer to occur, rather than the 'mere' five million years it did take. Of course, the 'science' of geology is itself based on much circular thinking and a lot of a priori assumptions and all these periods of time should be taken with copious pinches of salt. It is refreshing to see so many reductionist Enlightenment narratives slowly unwind, to the helpless dismay of those who have upheld them through false authority. Goedelian mathematics, quantum physics and information theory are all very helpful in providing the data to counter these anti-Christian narratives. Many of the mathematicians and scientists involved in these various forms of research were/are Christians, most notably Kurt Goedel. The neuroscientist, Ian McGilchrist (not a Christian, but sympathetic to Christianity and very much so to Catholicism) with his recent book "The Master & His Emissary", suggests that much reductionist scientific thinking is a consequence of an unbalanced over-usage of the left hemisphere of the brain, which he likens as being somewhat analogous to the pathology that causes schizophrenia. He asserts that the greatest of human thinkers throughout recorded history, beginning with the early Greek philosophers, made their most insightful epistomological discoveries through a balanced deployment of both their right and left brain hemispheres. It's an interesting book and very supportive of the anti-official narrative ideas now emerging. I'm a little concerned about straying off-topic, but maybe this discussion is relevant as the Epstein issue is fundamentally about the propagation of a false narrative.
Yes but all the same I feel strongly I would like to know the answer to the question of whether we evolved from lower organisms or whether we were created as is. You clearly have a great grasp on this issue, much more informed and erudite on it than I am. I have great doubt whether I am clever enough to get to the bottom of the whole question. My thinking has been more in line with Luan Ribeiro's but I have been spoon fed the evolutionary narrative in college. I am prepared to accept that my whole thinking has been corrupted by my learning. When I worked in science I remember thinking that I had severe doubts about the ability of random mutation and natural selection to explain the existence of complexity in nature. I am convinced by Dr. James Tours that random chemical reactions cannot account for the origin of a simple life form. But leaving origin of life aside, James does a very good job on his channel of showing the severe problems with evolution of life forms using random mutation and natural selection. But the whole area is so complex that I have not got a feel for it myself. This is a project that could take a few years to obtain some level of proficiency in. I had an intuition that the evolutionary distances that scientists talk about in DNA and protein sequences might be re-interpreted as a 'distance' defined by any metric you like. Just as two fingerprints could be analysed and a metric devised to calculate a distance between them. So then perhaps one can reinterpret so-called evolutionary distances a simply pre-existing distances defined by characteristics of the organisms created by God. So it would be a bit like the novel theory that DeGaulle referred to. But would the statistics work? There is a lot of hokery pokery which scientists do with these evolutionary distances to get them to work and intuitively I get the sense that there might be circular reasoning going on there. And it is unfair because the evolutionary scientists are hiding behind a mask which only a select clique of numerate and scientifically literate can understand. I suspect they are getting away with trickery. So for me the jury is still out. But I feel I have to give both sides a fair chance and to be the devil's advocate for the evolution side as well. Undoubtedly, there is complexity in Information Theory but there is also immense complexity on the evolution side with not just single point mutations at play but gene rearrangements, gene ampifications, protein domain swapping and rapid expansions of multiple repeats, statistical phylogenetics and population genetics etc. on the evolutionary side. Is anyone clever enough to asses it all? I think those on the creation / intelligent design side consistently fail to appreciate the other side's complexity and possible ability to explain how evolution might work. One scientist who is a creationist who I have a lot of respect for is Donny Budinsky who's channel is Standing for Truth. Anyway, that is a whole project for the future. But what does it matter? Well, I feel that if I knew the answer to the question Biblical creation or evolution it would affect my Faith. If Evolution, then I would become more of a modernist. The other thing is - how far does one go with the Biblical world view? 1. Creation vs Evolution 2. Geocentrism vs Heliocentrism 3. Flat earth vs Globe ?
A lot to be unpacked! The first point I would make is that we have two sources of knowledge: 1). Revelation, which comes from God Himself. 2). Knowledge derived from human activity and thought. Revelation is absolutely reliable, because if He so intends, God will ensure that we learn what we need to know. He might have to limit the extent of His Revelation in accordance with our limits of comprehension. Human-derived knowledge: without the guidance of the Holy Spirit, a series of often sophisticated shots in the dark. Remember that those who insist we can know it all, by 'following the science', also largely assert that we are a chance being on an obscure little planet in a backward corner of an unimaginably immense universe. They build us up for their own ends and disparage us when we draw the logical conclusions. Your first question is whether we are derived from lower beings than ourselves. Despite all the fancy Darwinistic terms and theories, predominantly lacking in empirical support, I don't think a single instance of development of a new species, even among bacteria in lab conditions has ever been observed. So, it's plausible that individual creation of species is required. We might be derived from lower beings in the sense that we consist of much shared genotype and phenotypical construction. Then, all living beings also consist of atoms and molecules. But only the human body is formed by a human soul to whatever degree we are images of God. I'm thinking as I type, but our individual existences come into being at the moment of conception, which is also coterminous with our ensoulment, which is the moment of Thomist formation. Maybe, that's wherein is the Mystery. I wouldn't be overwhelmed by the 'expertise' of the biologists. In his recent book 'Probability Zero', Vox Day (he was in Mensa, I believe, but has left, because of his contrarianism, but he's fairly smart), highlighted the considerable mathematical ignorance of most biologists, a function of their graduate and post-grad options, extending back to a famous confrontation between eminent mathematician/physicist Darwin sceptics and leading evolutionary biologists in 1966. The great philosopher of science, Karl Popper, also denied that evolutionary theory met the criteria for being a science. What keeps Darwinism going is an extreme example of the argument from authority by a group that massively dominates their faculty and chooses its own successors. Ironically, they can't evolve. Geocentrism: there are many plausible arguments for it, re-emerging, particularly with new astronomical discoveries. According to Einstein, it's neither-or-both. Robert Sungenis has written an enormous book of 3000 pages on the issue. We have the evidence of our own eyes that the Earth is round.
I am happy with everyone having this conversation. What I am not happy with is one side eliminating opposition to their ideas while forcing every abomination possible down our throats. Which is why I am entirely happy to see the religion of darwinism go in the dust bin.
Our governments are run by pedophiles. These videos are important to see so that we are aware of this satanic/demonic world. The WARNING and MIRACLE are in an even year. Pray for the children, pray that this is the year that we will see our sins as God sees them.
True I mean darwinism could have simply been a competing worldview which is something I wouldn't have had a problem with. For its time it made sense, but with the evidence today showing it doesn't work it should be entirely thrown on the garbage heap of failed ideas. Instead it rode the coattails of the "enlightenment" which is simply another anti-Christian ideology. Every anti-Christian ideology in history always got rid of the competition of ideas by eliminating free speech. Suppression of speech is entirely contrary to darwinism. What gets me about "darwinism" is how its adherents didn't even follow its own tenets. One of the biggest things that should have been supported by darwinism is the family unit. It should have been seen as the most essential part of society according to their theory. The pinnacle of "evolution". Instead they did everything that goes against evolution and survival of the fittest. There are so many examples of this hypocrisy existing in the followers darwinism. I mean, these "scientists" claim their locus is the pursuit of truth, but instead they give us relativism. Which is why guys like Dawkins and Hitchens are seen as the losers they are today. They completely failed because they stand for nothing even when what is before them is entirely evident. Their ideology completely failed not just from a mathematical, biological and geological standpoint. But also from a social standpoint which is the worst of all. I cannot imagine how they came to prominence and how people bought into their absurd notions. But here we are.
Yes, & how many of them will be arrested? Probably none. God is coming as the just judge very soon. It is true, that ppl with all the money & power rule this world with Satan as their god, but Christ is King & we'll all have to answer to Him soon enough. I'm noticing that ppl don't even view ppl as humans anymore. We're all His children. With the constant attacks on one another it's an attack on God as our Father & Creator since we're created in His image. But ppl just wanna fight for the sake of it, or hurt, insult without really thinking about it. Generally, ppl think they are superior, that we all won't be bowing down to God. This is a time of great humility, a time to remember who we belong to & that our neighbour is also a precious child of God. I ask God to always illuminate my conscience, as well as pray other's consciences will also be illuminated. All this fighting is so pointless, but it seems ppl want to insist on it. Of course, we should say something about evil & God is bringing all the darkness to light. But with ppl not really knowing right from wrong anymore the message is always 'I will fight you on that.' It's so sad. Jesus is the Prince of Peace.
"Pride will be their downfall" was very evident in the opening ceremony of the winter olympics. You would think with all that is going on with Epstein they would lie a little low for a while, but a ceremony around an upside down pentagram!!!
Absolutely, as I think I said in my post. I would say it was an hypothesis which is part of science but it assumed a dominant position and became a paradigm sitting on a throne of unquestionability. The problem is that no one could get funding if they believed in the intelligen design / creationist position. With the result that there are very few creationists now who can refute the hypothesis with the hard science of numbers and statistics. Either two and two is four or the hypothesis is wrong. Just saying something to be false means nothing, one has to bring the receipts. This is where Dr. James Tour is great - he can stick it to the evolutionists with their own methods. But it is a David and Goliath contest. I think Vox Day is wrong to imply that biologists simply don't understand the statistical implications of their theories. There is a whole army of statistical geneticists, bioinformsticians and evolutionary and computational biologists on the Evolutionary side. In terms of creationism, the astrophysocist, Hugh Ross, a Christian, believes in it but he is not a young earth creatuonist. He believes the 'days' in thr Genesis narratives should not be interpreted literally but as aeons. When we look up at the night sky we can see dark patches with no stars. But that doesn't mean we should believe our eyes. How can it be that when the James Webb Space Telescope examines the same tiny pstch of dark sky, it reveals not just stars but galaxies, and not just galaxies but billions of galaxies. And as they focus in further they see not just billiions of galaxies but trillions of them? The Heavens declare the glory of God. When we look at the snow we see just white fluffy stuff but on closer examination we see intricate detail with each snow flake having a unique structure. If I could be so bold as to try to step into the shoes of the evolutionist. We see 2 proteins with amino acids strung along in linear sequence, like beads on a string. Only the beads are of all different shapes and sizes and colours and hues. And these different bead characteristics determine the function of the protein and the health and fitness of the host organism. And we can compare the two proteins and define a distance between them based on the similarities in their sequences and the distannces between them based on the likely number of underlying DNA mutations necessary to convert the amino acid at one position in sequence 1 to the amino acid found at the same corresponding position in sequence 2. Then if I compare a whole bunch of proteins snd cluster them into clades with a branching tree structure bssed on these similarities and distances - out pops a tree, a phylogenetic gene tree structure which charts likely ancestry showing how one sequence most likely evolved from another in a defined sequence of events. And then you overlay that on all kinds of other data such as likely evolutionary distances based on fossils, morphological features, habitat colocstion etc - and they align or remarkably agree given a few discrepancies here and there! So like the snowflake and the microscope or the patch of dark sky snd the telescope, from a simple few strings of beads on a chain an amazing unique, intricate and complex fingerprint pops out which can most parsimonuously be explained by stepwise evolution from common ancestors - what am I to conclude! Bring the receipts! Ok I don't like being forced into defending Evolution, but one of these theories, Evolution or Creation is correct and the other is wrong - just as 2 + 2 = 4 and 2 + 2 != 5. That is how scientists think. But the playing field needs to be levelled now to let the talented creationists kick the tyres on this Evolutionary hypothesis and bring the receipts for Creationism.
The sequence space is enormous and the probability of selecting the necessary proteins randomly, in other words by chance, is infinitesimally unlikely.
That is true. Given any protein sequence one can define a probability of the existence of that sequence. That probability is given as the product of all the probabities (given by the background frequency of an amino acid across all known sequences) for each amino acid in the sequence. The longer the protein sequence, the lower the total probability of the protein. The values can be astronomically small like 10 to the power of minus 256 or 735 etc. Creationists like to use that kind of calculation to put a stop to evolution. However, the rates at which Dna polymerases process along a DNA strand and insert nucleotides is enormous. The rates at which mutations occur is very large. The rates at which ribosomes synthetise proteins is enormous. Within that multifdmensional protein vector space there is great redundancy in functional outcomes. Also, everything happens in stepsise fashion. Evolutionists don't just talk about a vast sea of chemicals in a vast soup witt infinesimal chances of anything interacting with anything else in a functional way. Yes you could say that the chances of any human existing at all are 1 in 10 to the minus 1026. But all probabilities in Evolution are bayesian probabilities being condituonal upon a previous step. That makes the probabilities much more plausible. Coupled with that, all this is happening in an enormous energy and entropy gradient coming from the Sun, the Galaxy etc which is driving these processes. It's not just happening in a vscuum. The molecules are themselves spring loaded with potential for self-organisation due to their inherent electronic properties. And even then, creation / annihilation of electrons ex nihilo has been demonstrated with quantum tunneling of electrons across gaps in macromolecular complexes etc. I simply dont have time to say any more. All I am calling for is to let the experts prove or disprove the theories. I have acknowledged the huge problems with evolution and the chicken and egg conundrums that it presents.
The thing is that experts have disproved the theories including evolution. The math, biology and geology simply isn't there to support it. If you want to remain open to it I understand, but people should know what the theory is up against scientifically. IE... How do you get from a single celled organism to a multicellular organism? This is insanely complicated and can't be explained by a random mutation. It's entirely obvious that the leap cannot just happen out of some kind of self-organization. And this needs to be tackled before we get even further down the line of more complex evolution steps. I am also giving you the first cell spontaneously coming to life, with the built in abilities to reproduce and feed, which is a mathematical impossibility. The next jumps down the evolution line are even more mathematically impossible. And the thing is that this is simply one question which destroys evolution. There are probably over 30 that I have heard so far. It is nothing personal InVeratatim but I simply can't believe in a scientific theory which doesn't hold scientifically, and we don't necessarily have to be experts to see that. It is clear to me that something else is going on which we don't understand.
There is much evidence that many of the 'experts' are atheists who are ideologically-driven. I think it was Richard Lewontin who said that 'God must not be let put a foot in the door', at any cost. I think the implication of his statement was that evolutionary biologists had to be prepared to uphold the most unlikely and outlandish arguments in order to prevent that. Then again, there's that man, Dawkins, hardly a paradigm of expertise. As regards your statement that 'molecules are spring-loaded with potential for self-organisation, due to their inherent electronic properties'; this is inarguable, but all such properties are indicators of programmed coherent information. Such information cannot ultimately create itself. At some point one needs a First Cause or we're in a hopeless situation of infinite regress (which is, in layman's terms, a ruse by atheists to 'kick the can back the road'). I'm sceptical of your assertion of 'creation' ex-nihilo. The very basic foundational theories of physics assert that nothing can come from nothing. In the quantum case, we are dealing with fields of potential, in which in certain circumstances matter can materialise from 'nothing'. But, potential is not nothing. In any case, you're providing the specific example of 'creation/annihilation of electrons ex nihilo' in quantum tunneling. Is not the annihilation of electrons accompanied by a release of energy? In the opposite direction, is there not an energy input required to create them? I don't think some physicists understand the concept of 'nothing'. It's probably too big (itself an absurd descriptive) for the human mind to grasp (or, more accurately, not). If one can talk about nothing, it's likely that what one is talking about is not nothing. The late Stephen Hawking had a theory of 'quantum vacuum', involving imaginary numbers, to explain the origin of the Big Bang. He seemed to think that this was creation ex nihilo, which could eliminate God, but neither vacuums or imaginary numbers are nothing. As regards evolution consisting of Bayesian probabilities being conditional on a previous step, this introduces a concept of process, but the neo-Darwinists also maintain that selection is entirely random and a matter of chance. If one introduces process into evolution, it can't be avoided that there is now present a quantity of pre-programmed information. One has therefore introduced intelligence. It is no longer mindless. The question, then, is what (or Who) is this mind. On the other hand, if selection is not directed and is purely random, as they like us to believe, every protein selected has presented itself purely randomly and could be any protein from that vast sequence space, each protein presented bearing no relation to the one before (otherwise, randomness goes out the window, and pesky information sticks a foot in the door). I think there's a more fundamental problem. Has anyone here ever scratched a music cd? Has anyone ever noticed an improvement in the quality of the music (this example might not apply to 'rap' or 'hip-hop')? The older among us probably remember when the tape from cassettes tangled in the tape-player mechanism. Did anyone find an improvement in the music? The point is that cd's and cassettes are storage media for information. The idea that information such as that stored in DNA can be randomly and accidentally improved, resembles in probability terms that famous example of how long it will take a group of trained chimpanzees to type out a line of Shakespeare. Evolution, as proposed by the neo-Darwinists (there are coherent and plausible theories of Evolution, contra the Creationists) is dependent on the mindless selection of presented accidentally altered base-pair sequences. As the genome is really a huge 4-letter alphabet of information, purposed to direct the form of its target phenotype, such change is similar to typing out a series of sentences via a random bunch of letters in your car manual to help you fix your carburettor. Given that one single change in a base-pair can cause fatal and horrific alterations of phenotype (and there are many tragic examples, mostly miscarried or still-born), it is a very big stretch to conceive that far more extensive and radical changes caused randomly and mindlessly can somehow confer huge phenotypical benefits. No amount of sophistic phrases and words and appeals to probabilistic processes can easily alter these stumbling blocks. Remember, sophism is really a term for hiding behind dense, ultimately deceptive, jargon. One other weakness, derived from Popper. Neo-Darwinism has an answer for every objection and such objections are immediately dismissed. The theory has an explanation for every possible circumstance and every discovery is deemed to confirm it. In other words, it is unfasifiable. Popper considered all such too-good theories to be too good to be true. He described neo-Darwinism as unscientific. Thanks for provoking me with your devil's advocacy!
There are other, plausible, theories of evolution, but neo-Darwinism completely dominates the genre and the other theories cannot even get a look-in. The reason seems to be ideological. The other theories do not rule out God and therefore can't be accepted by the current evolutionary establishment.
Epstein files just the tip of the iceberg. Marjorie Taylor Greene talks satanic rituals, cannibalism and much more. Mind boggling. Names of coconspirators were redacted but NOT the names of victims!!? About 30 minutes long but totally worth it.
